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Thursday, November 1, 2012

The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935)

I brought over some more videos from the Universal horror
collection (I seem at the moment to have misplaced my tape of Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man, The Invisible Man and The
Invisible Man Returns[1], but I was able to locate just about everything else
I have in the way of Universal horror films — which isn’t much, at least on
VHS: I have old Beta tapes of such important films as the 1934 Black
Cat, the 1935 Raven and the 1936 Invisible Ray but have never re-acquired these on VHS) and ran him
The Bride of Frankenstein and an
important non-horror Karloff item, The Criminal Code from 1930 (that’s the copyright date on the print,
though I’d always had the impression it wasn’t released until 1931). The
Bride of Frankenstein is as wonderful as I
remember it, full of British-camp dry wit (courtesy of writers John L.
Balderston — he declined credit for the final script because he thought too
much of the humor had been taken out and too much of the horror left in, but he
is still co-credited with the original story — and William Hurlbut, a last name
Charles found singularly unpleasant for him, as well as director James Whale)
and blessed with a marvelous musical score by Franz Waxman.[2]
Except for one obvious cue — at the end of the fight sequence in the hermit’s
hut, when the hut burns down and the hunters take the hermit into custody after
having tried to kill the monster — Waxman’s music continually plays against the clichés of horror scoring, up to and including
the beautiful wedding bells that peal out on the soundtrack when “The Monster’s
Mate” is introduced and Ernest Thesiger intones the magic words, “The Bride —
of Frankenstein!”

The Bride of Frankenstein is James Whale’s horror masterpiece — no wonder he insisted on
abandoning the genre after this
one; he simply had nothing more to say about it! It’s the closest Frankenstein
movie ever made to Mary Shelley’s original conception (despite the 1970’s TV
miniseries and Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film, both of which were billed as close adaptations of Shelley but really weren’t)
and, of course, features her as a character in the opening sequence. Elsa
Lanchester revealed in her autobiography that it was part of Whale’s conception
from day one that the same actress would play Mary Shelley at the beginning and
the “bride of Frankenstein” at the end, and when she interviewed for the role
it was with the understanding that if she were cast, it would be in both parts.
She also said that the famous electric hairdo was all her own hair except for the grey streaks on
either side, which were added, and Jack Pierce devised a wire framework to get
her hair to stand straight up. (Until I read that, I had always assumed all the Bride’s hair was a wig.) The script is full of
camp humor, and even the “serious” moments have an ironic edge — nowhere more
obvious than in the very famous scene in which the Monster is captured by the
townspeople and hoisted up onto a wagon to be carted back to town, and in a
marvelous full-front shot the Monster is made to look like Christ on the cross!
(When the documentary The Celluloid Closet paralleled this sequence from The Bride of Frankenstein with the ending flashback of Suddenly,
Last Summer it made a somewhat different
point from the one the makers of The Celluloid Closet intended: what it really indicated was the difference between an out and
proud Gay man like James Whale expressing sympathy for the outsider and turning
the Monster into a man, and a bitterly self-hating closet case like Tennessee
Williams expressing hatred and fear for the outsider and turning Sebastian into
a monster.) Karloff’s acting is as splendid as ever, notably when the Monster
makes the same open-handed gesture he did in the earlier film, looking for
human warmth and affection (though there’s a marvelously ironic scene in which
the Monster looks at his own face reflected in a lake and reacts to his
ugliness just about the way the humans in the film do — he cries out and sticks
his hands in the water to make his reflection go away). Karloff was upset in
later years that they gave the Monster the power of speech in this one — but I
think it humanizes the character brilliantly, though at the cost of making him
less terrifying, and I only wish Whale, Hurlbut and Balderston had gone all the
way and followed Mary Shelley in making the Monster fully articulate and conversant with John Milton’s Paradise
Lost (with which he identifies his own
situation, seeing himself as Adam and Frankenstein as God). — 10/19/98

•••••

After we watched the 1910 Edison Frankenstein on my laptop (I’d left it out when I put the bed
into sleep mode so we could watch it on the computer, since the disc Charles
had loaded it onto was incompatible with the DVD player) I got to the business
I’d set for the evening: running what I only half-jokingly called “the two Gayest
horror films ever made”: The Bride of Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Charles had spotted a copy of Rocky Horror at his workplace and I urged him to buy it since it
would be fun to see it again, and I thought of continuing our sequence of the
Universal Frankenstein films and double-billing Rocky Horror with Bride because James Whale’s “take” on the Frankenstein mythos was pretty Gay even in the first film in the series
(see my notes on it) and is even more so in Bride. The Bride of
Frankenstein remains a masterpiece, the
greatest film ever made in the horror genre and certainly the summit of James Whale’s work in
the genre (he never made another
horror film, unless you count The Man in the Iron Mask as one because of its quite gripping dungeon
scenes).

It has all the virtues of the first film — a gloomy,
appropriately Gothic atmosphere through the use of subtly but unmistakably
stylized sets as well as chiaroscuro
camerawork; the first-rate performances of Colin Clive as Frankenstein and Boris
Karloff (billed only by his last name because Universal’s marketing department
thought that made him seem more sinister — indeed, the trailer referred to him
as “Karloff the Uncanny,” an apparent attempt to suggest to credulous
movie-goers that he was something more than just an ordinary human actor with a
particular gift for bringing life to monster roles); the overall infrastructure
of Universal that enabled them to churn out a movie like this with the same
casual expertise with which MGM could do a romantic drama or Warners a gangster
film; and the cool electronic gadgets created by Kenneth Strickfaden (indeed,
the gadgets in this film are cooler than the ones in the first one, notably
that series of flashing lights that indicates the rate at which the stolen
heart they’re about to transplant into the female monster is beating) — and
quite a few of its own: a much warmer, more intense performance by the new
Elizabeth, Valerie Hobson, than Mae Clarke gave in the original; a vivid,
well-conceived score by Franz Waxman that (with the exception of one rather
obvious cue when the two hunters, one of them played by John Carradine, burn
down the hermit’s shack) plays against the clichés of horror-film writing (the wedding bells Waxman puts on
the soundtrack when Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorious announces the birth of
“The bride of Frankenstein!” are only the most imaginative touch in a score
full of them); and, most of all, an audacious script by William Hurlbut and
John L. Balderston that reflects and facilitates Whale’s subtly campy approach
to the material. There’s some confusion about the writing credits here because
Hurlbut and Balderston are both credited with “adaptation” but Hurlbut is given
sole credit for the actual screenplay. In fact, both writers worked on the
script throughout (after some earlier versions by one Tom Reed under the title Return
of Frankenstein) but Balderston took his
name off the screenplay credit because too many of his jokes had been taken
out; he’d wanted the film to be even more of a spoof on the mythos than it is.

Bride of Frankenstein
has been called the closest adaptation Mary Shelley’s novel ever received for
film, which is true but also an indication of how far we’ve ever been from a
true adaptation of her work that would take more than the central premise. (I
still hope that I will live to see a Frankenstein film that dares to make the monster fully
articulate, have him narrate a good chunk of the story and have him quote John
Milton’s Paradise Lost — he
sees himself as Adam and Frankenstein as God — all of which occurs in the
book.) First there’s the marvelous prologue in which Byron and Shelley (played
by two of the queeniest actors in Hollywood just then, Gavin Gordon and Douglas
Walton, respectively) note the irony that a young woman like Shelley’s wife
Mary (Elsa Lanchester), who’s afraid of lightning and the dark, nonetheless
wrote a terrifying story that makes liberal use of both. Over film clips from
the first Universal Frankenstein
she narrates the story and then goes into the sequel — in which the monster is
shown as explicitly Christ-like throughout the film, from the cross shape that
emerges from the beams of the windmill as the flames finally consume it at the
start of the main plot to the way the monster is shot to look like Christ on
the cross as he is strung up by the villagers and tied to a pole to be taken to
the local prison for incarceration. (The scene in which the monster breaks his
chains and escapes seems to have been copied by Whale from the similar escape
scene in King Kong — I even
joked, “I told you we shouldn’t
have bought those chains at Carl Denham’s garage sale!” — and if that was
Whale’s inspiration, it only shows he knew who his filmmaking peers were.)
Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius (the name comes from a real-life medieval
alchemist) is one of the most astonishing character inventions in 1930’s
cinema, a mad scientist who’s also courtly and genuinely charming, as he
rattles off a list of sins (vodka, wine, cigarettes) and calls each in turn “my
only weakness.” One gets the impression that having this man for dinner would
be far more entertaining than having Frankenstein, racked as he is with
self-doubts and guilt over having created the monster and therefore being (as
Pretorius points out) at least partially responsible for all the monster’s
killings. Indeed, Bride of Frankenstein as it progresses becomes less and less a film about monsters created
from dead bodies and brought to life with lightning, and more and more a film
about Frankenstein’s own conflict between respectable married life and his dark
(i.e., Gay) side. The original Frankenstein could be read as a clash between straight and Gay —
between the demands of society in general and Frankenstein’s father in
particular that he marry a woman and father “a son to the House of
Frankenstein” through normal, heterosexual means and his work with a male
companion to bring to life a “son” without sexual intercourse.

Bride makes this
trope a bit less blatantly sexual (especially since the elder Frankenstein
isn’t an on-screen character and his death is announced on screen with a
bewildering suddenness that leaves us no clue as to when it supposedly
happened) but quite a bit more sophisticated otherwise. In his scenes with
Elizabeth, Frankenstein has a hang-dog attitude which dramatizes just how hard
he’s working to repress his desire to go on with his work (i.e., to continue
creating life outside the normal bounds of heterosexuality); in his scenes with
Pretorius he’s genuinely turned on. Perhaps it’s taken Elizabeth’s kidnapping
to get him to sign on to his final experiment, but once he’s done so he’s a
fully committed and, indeed, eager participant — and even more than his
relationship with Fritz in the first film, his relationship with Pretorius here
is, if not homoerotic, at least extremely homoaffectionate. Pretorius treats him as a former protégé whom he’s
now admitted to a position of equality (the way a sugar daddy might finally
acknowledge a man he picked up as a teenager and had been living with ever
since), and his whole attitude towards Frankenstein has an intense subtext of,
“I know what you really want … ”
Indeed, tallying with his Christ-like position throughout the film, it’s the
monster who becomes Frankenstein’s conscience and sends him back to the
straight world at the end, pulling the lever that blows up the old lighthouse
where both he and the bride were born (it’s a measure of the demented logic
that rules this film that it’s not until it’s over that we wonder why the lab
came equipped with a self-destruct mechanism) and sending Frankenstein and
Elizabeth away while consigning the film’s entire Gay underworld — Pretorius,
himself and the bride who rejected him just like every other “normal” person
(save for the blind hermit, in the scene in the film most directly lifted from
Mary Shelley’s novel — and in which Whale scores a major directorial triumph by
getting a finely honed, understated performance from O. P. Heggie, who usually
was one of the biggest hams in Hollywood) — to oblivion. The Bride of
Frankenstein is one of the greatest films
ever made, a rare example of a sequel that surpasses its predecessor (others
are the second parts of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and Coppola’s The Godfather) and an artistic triumph in a genre that had a slovenly reputation even then and has a
worse one now. — 10/28/07

•••••

Our friend Garry Hobbs came in and we ended up watching the
last 20 minutes or so of the original Frankenstein on TCM, which was doing a marathon of Universal
horror films from the 1930’s and 1940’s (as well as one “ringer,” Island
of Lost Souls, the first and best
adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, made at Paramount in 1933 but taken over by
Universal when it merged with MCA in 1962 after MCA-TV had bought the 1927-1949
Paramount catalog in 1957), and though my original plan was to keep on TCM and
watch Son of Frankenstein,
scheduled immediately afterwards, Garry was piqued by my comments about The
Bride of Frankenstein and wanted to see
that one next. So I ran Bride
from my copy of the Universal Legacy boxed set of most of their Frankenstein movies (actually five of the eight — the first four
plus number six, House of Frankenstein; number five, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, was in the Wolf Man Legacy set; number seven, House of Dracula, in the Dracula set; and number eight, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, isn’t in the horror boxes but is in the complete Abbott and Costello boxed set from
Universal) and enjoyed just about everything about it I’ve loved before it and
which has made it my favorite horror film of all time: James Whale’s stunning
direction, the wry and deliciously witty script by William Hurlbut and John L.
Balderston (given Balderston’s record in other films I had always assumed the
witticisms in the script were his, until I read David J. Skal’s The
Monster Show and he revealed that
Balderston’s first draft for the film was grim, deadly serious and almost
totally lacking the wry humor that gives this film much of its appeal), Jack P.
Pierce’s makeup jobs on both the Monster (Boris Karloff, playing the role for
the second of three times — he gave it up after number three, Son of
Frankenstein — and getting top billing, the
only time he did for playing the Monster) and his Mate (Elsa Lanchester, who
also appears as Mary Shelley in the prologue explaining how the novel Frankenstein came to be written), Franz Waxman’s inventive and
dazzling score (the high point is the wedding bells on the soundtrack that peal
out to announce the Bride’s creation), and the peculiar Gay strain that runs
through the whole movie.

The first Universal Frankenstein can be read as a Gay allegory — there’s a consistent
and conscious opposition between the demands of Frankenstein’s father
(Frederick Kerr) that he marry his fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke in the first Frankenstein, Valerie Hobson in Bride) and produce “a son to the House of Frankenstein”
through normal (hetero)sexual means, and his desire to hide out in an abandoned
watch tower with a male assistant (in the novel Frankenstein works alone) to
create a new human life without the necessity of sex with a woman. In Bride the allegory is pushed even further; even before we
see Dr. Pretorious (Ernest Thesiger, who came off as a cultured queen — sort of
the beta version of Quentin Crisp — even though, according to Skal, in real
life he was totally straight and married to the same woman for five decades)
he’s described by the Frankensteins’ maid (Una O’Connor at her most deliciously
hysterical) as “a queer sort of gentleman,” and Skal dug up a 1936 novelization
of Bride by British author
Michael Harrison that made it even more obvious than the movie did: in his
version Pretorious tells Frankenstein, “‘Come, be fruitful and multiply.’ Let
us obey the Biblical injunction: you, of course, have the choice of natural
means; but as for me, I am afraid that there is no course open but the
scientific way.” It’s a thrill to watch Bride just to see how much Whale and his writers got past
the censors; with Joseph Breen, the head of the Production Code Administration,
zeroing in on just about every line in the dialogue that compared Frankenstein
to God and his achievement to the original creation, Whale did it visually,
especially in the audacious shot in which the Monster has been captured, tied
to a tree trunk and is being lifted into a cart — and Whale and cinematographer
John Mescall pick an angle that makes it look like the Monster is being
crucified.

The anti-religious tweaking and the Queer angle are both
pushed to the max when Pretorious shows Frankenstein the doll-like miniature
creatures he’s created (including a queen, a king — made up to look and act
like Henry VIII in the famous film in which he was played by Lanchester’s Gay
husband, Charles Laughton — and one who was so disapproving of the others
Pretorious made him an archbishop), and he confesses that though he’s been able
to create humanoids, he’s been unable to make them normal human size. “You did achieve size,” Pretorious tells Frankenstein — sounding for all the world like a Gay
man with a small penis talking to someone much better hung. As I wrote the last
time I watched Bride (with
Charles on a tour through all the Universal Frankensteins in sequence), Dr. Pretorious (whose name came from
a real-life medieval alchemist) isn’t your typical movie mad scientist: he’s
someone it would actually be nice to have over for dinner — engaging, witty,
with a self-deprecating streak, a far cry from the maddeningly self-righteous
obsessives Karloff and Bela Lugosi played in their mad-scientist movies! — 11/1/12

[1]— I found these in the stacks by the fax machine in my room — just about
the least accessible part of my video collection — but not in numerical sequence. Oh, well …

[2]— Incidentally, until recently I’d always thought the bits of music in
the original Frankenstein film from 1931 — just main themes under the opening and
closing credits — had been written by the Universal music director, David
Broekman. According to Randall D. Larson’s Musique Fantastique: A Survey of
Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema, however, the opening theme was actually written by German
composer Bernhard Kaun — who two years later worked with Max Steiner on
orchestrating Steiner’s music for King Kong — and the closing theme was a
pre-existing cue by Giuseppe Becce, “Grand Appassionato,” which had been
written for insertion into silent films. Kaun ended up with a formidable list
of credits in the fantasy genre; among the ones Larson lists are Dr. X, One-Way Passage (main title only, as in Frankenstein), Mystery of the Wax Museum,
Death Takes a Holiday
(inserts only), Return of the Terror, The Walking Dead (a reunion with Karloff), The
Invisible Menace
(Karloff again!), The Return of Dr. X (Humphrey Bogart’s only horror film!), and collaborations
on The Body Disappears and The Smiling Ghost. Based on work by a previous researcher, William H. Rosar
(the first person to penetrate the department-head credit to Broekman and
reveal that Kaun actually wrote the Frankenstein main-title music), Larson notes:

Kaun’s main title music for Frankenstein bears many of the marks of
traditional horror film music, especially as it came to be stereotyped in the
ensuing years. Opening with a repeated modal figure invoking a thick, Teutonic
feeling over a churning, chromatic bass line and punctuated by frightful brass
trills, the latter half of the theme consists of a more mysterious, subdued
woodwind meandering, culminating in an abrupt piano glissando that sweeps away
the music, ending with a mood of bleak mystery.